The Northern Pike

With light spots over a dark background and a brilliant green to olive-green dorsal area, the northern pike is a striking fish (pun intended).

A voracious predator, pike are well known to attack almost anything alive, including small muskrats, ducklings, loon chicks, mice and nearly any smaller fish in the lake. On Scott and its flyouts typical pike prey would be leeches, burbot, ciscos, whitefish, lake trout and yes, smaller pike. Our pike spawn as soon as the shallow marshy areas are ice free. This is typically a time when the main lake is still ice covered so we have never observed the spawning process, about 3 or 4 days in duration, at Scott. The fertilized eggs attach to vegetation and hatch into fry in a week to two weeks. The fry will live off their egg sacks until they start swimming and feeding on zooplankton and insect larvae. Females mature at about six years of age (around 20" in length) and produce about 9,000 eggs per pound.

There has been no management and minimal harvest of our pike: it is a rare, naturally functioning ecosystem. Due to the cold waters and relatively low productivity (a measure of the "living things" in the water,) growth rates are very slow. But Scott pike are long lived and still get to monster proportions. In warmer, southern waters the maximum life span might hit 10 to 12 years. At Scott and in similar waters that age span will approach 30 years for pike.

In 2001 a group of fishery biologists from the British Columbia Institute of Technology in Vancouver conducted field studies as part of Lodge funded research and determined the age of some Scott pike. We did not harvest trophy pike but did keep some small to mid-sized pike to get aging data. Their research did show a very slow growth rate. Five year old pike ranged from 18-22 inches in length, but an 11 year old pike at Scott is only 28-30". One 13 year old was only 29". The big fish (40-50") are very old. That's the reason why catch and release for trophy fish is so critical in preserving a quality fishery.